Princess Alice of Battenberg
Princess Alice of Battenberg (25 February 1885 – 5 December 1969) was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and the mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II. For much of her life, she was accused of being insane and was confined to a mental hospital before devoting herself to being an Orthodox Christian nun in Athens, Greece. In 1967, following the rise of the Regime of the Colonels, she was invited to live at Buckingham Palace with the British royal family, and she reconciled with her son after The Guardian - which had previously been highly critical of the royal family during the economic crisis of the mid-1960s - praised her as the "royal saint" and an amazing stepmother. She died two years later at the age of 84. Biography Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie Battenberg was born at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, England on 25 February 1885, the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. She was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who was present at her birth; she was also the sister of Louise Mountbatten, George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, and Louis Mountbatten. During her youth, her family considered her to be slow, as she was born deaf and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. On 6 October 1903, she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and she moved with him to Greece. She was involved in charity work while her husband served in the military, and she served as a nurse during the Balkan Wars. In June 1917, the royal family was forced into exile in Switzerland after her brother-in-law Constantine I of Greece was forced to abdicate, and they briefly returned to Greece in 1920 before Nikolaos Plastiras and Stylianos Gonatas seized power in a military coup. The family fled to Paris, France, and Alice became deeply religious and converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1928. In 1930, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia after suffering a severe nervous breakdown, and she was placed in a sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where Sigmund Freud suggested X-raying her ovaries in order to kill off her libido. From 1930 to 1931, all of Alice's daughters were married off to German princes, and Alice was unable to attend any of their weddings due to her hospitalization. After she was released, she returned to Athens in 1938 to work with the poor. During World War II, she helped to hide Greek Jews from the German Wehrmacht, which had initially assumed that she was pro-Nazi due to her sons-in-laws' service in the German military. In November 1947, she attended the wedding of her only son, Philip, to Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, and, in January 1949, Alice founded the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns based in Athens. Following the rise of the Regime of the Colonels in 1967, Alice was invited to reside permanently at Buckingham Palace in London, and she gave everything away before she died on 5 December 1969 at the age of 84. In 1988, her remains were transferred from Windsor Castle to an Orthodox convent on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. Category:1885 births Category:1969 deaths Category:Greek noblewomen Category:Danish noblewomen Category:Greeks Category:Danish Category:Noblewomen Category:Orthodox Christians Category:Lutherans Category:Protestants Category:Converts to Orthodoxy from Protestantism Category:British Category:Germans Category:English